Anytime you sign your name to a contract, you should keep a copy so you have a record of what terms you agreed to. That protects you against someone trying to change the terms later, as authorities allege happened in this case.

Two Lehigh Valley men were charged last week in what the U.S. attorney's office in Philadelphia described as a "fraud scheme involving energy contracts."

Officials said companies in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey who signed contracts to buy electricity through a broker, Coastal Energy LLC, later found the terms of the signed contracts had been altered, which resulted in them paying "much higher rates for energy than they had contracted for."